I've been keeping up with Dinosaur Dracula's Halloween Countdown lately, being a fan of Matt Caracappa's work since the good ol' days of X-Entertainment. And, one idea of his that really catches my eye is the Halloween Mood Table, a special area of the house, usually a small table, where one puts lots of Halloween decorations and activities to help keep their Halloween spirit alive as the big day draws closer. As he's always encouraging others to adopt this idea with mood tables of their own, I decided to give it a try.
Starting with a duo of TV trays and covering them with a plastic Halloween door cover...
I soon created a world of Halloween fun right in my living room! As you can see (you can click any of these pictures to make them larger BTW) , I have the paper maché pumpkin mask as seen in this post. I also have an inflatable skeleton purchased from my local antiques/random stuff store, a cool black plastic skull, and some dancing top-hat pumpkin statues that my family traditionally gets out at Halloween and keeps around until New Years. And, inside the pumpkin mask is a set of flashing lights with cool Halloween sound effects. I just flip a switch and watch it spring to life!
As you can see, I have an assortment of movies and books on the table as well, that way I have easy access to all kinds of Halloween appropriate things to watch and read...
Bubba Ho-Tep: an excellent off-beat horror dramedy.
To me each Halloween season has me in the mood for a different kind of monster. Some years it's vampires, other years it's werewolves, Frankenstein, slasher-villains, etc. This year, to me, is the year of the 1950s/1960s sci-fi horror! Aliens, Atomic-Science-Gone-A-Muck, Giant Bugs, Ed Wood, whatever takes us back to a time when aliens were a stand-in for Communists and giant monsters were a metaphor for the atomic bomb!
And of course, the anime classic Vampire Hunter D. This is of course the result of me taping it from a movie channel one time that it came on. This is the original 80s film, but I do have the more modern sequel Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, on official DVD no less. I'll probably watch them both, but it's the original that makes it onto the mood table. I have some of the original books too, but for Halloween reading I have other things in mind...
Going with the popular horrors of my childhood. This includes Scary Stories for Sleepovers (the book I'm most likely to actually read), a trio of Goosebumps books, and Bruce Coville's Book of Monsters. Some light, but still scary (or at least fun) reading in between other activities for this busy October.
Anyway, this was a very fun project, and I thank Matt for making this a thing. I'll certainly consider doing this again next year. In the meantime, I have more Halloween Gallery entries to come (and they will be a lot less wordy).
Starting with a duo of TV trays and covering them with a plastic Halloween door cover...
As you can see, I have an assortment of movies and books on the table as well, that way I have easy access to all kinds of Halloween appropriate things to watch and read...
Anyway, this was a very fun project, and I thank Matt for making this a thing. I'll certainly consider doing this again next year. In the meantime, I have more Halloween Gallery entries to come (and they will be a lot less wordy).
